Try These 4 Tasty Treat Bakeries

Pets and people alike will enjoy them.

Kelley Long decided to open her pet bakery,The Doggie Express—DEX for short—in 2014, after her dog Adam got sick eating store-bought processed treats. She started out by traveling the country for a year, tasting items herself. “They’d say, Oh, this is bacon,” she remembers, “but it always tasted like cardboard.”

Today DEX’s treats are so good, humans have been known to indulge. Yes, it’s from personal experience that we know that Long’s chia-and-flaxseed cranberry-almond-crunch cookies are downright delicious; her custom iced cookies, like less-sweet sugar cookies. It's pretty amazing, considering her kitchen makes everything without gluten, dairy, eggs, GMOs, or nitrates.

Along with Long’s jerky-loving cat Boots, four resident dogs—including her Chihuahua-terrier Ethel, the “pickiest dog on Earth”—do the taste-testing. “It has to pass the Ethel test,” Long says. Ethel’s favorite treat? Peanut-butter-bacon-crunch cookies. Even Boots likes them.

But there’s more: cookie dough, custom cakes, jerky, a $25/month goodie box subscription, and—holy cuteness alert—a gift box that looks like a food truck, complete with Ethel and company behind the wheel. Soon, the DEX crew will move into a new storefront in Oak Forest. Until then, find Long’s treats at a dozen local spots including Peace Love Dogs, Wabash Feed & Garden, and Michael’s Cookie Jar, or simply order them online.

Three More Bakeries to Try

The Sugar Land shop features the ultimate cookie, jerky, and treat bar, which includes popular pizza-flavored bites and hilarious house-baked cookies—happy toast, despondent cacti. Need party favors for dogs and cats? There’s everything from real bull horns to dried minnows.